skin and bones
by indie misery
Summary: and in the end, her weeping drowned her screams and she was never okay. — dylan&josh — happy (very) belated halloween, for reva!


and in the end, her weeping drowned her screams and she was never okay. — dylan&josh — happy (very) belated halloween, for reva!

**prompts: **disappearing shadows, dying embers, a red glove, and a repeated record

**for: **reva, or 'forever invincible'! written for coppertone wars's halloween fic exchange thread.

**song listened to: **glory and gore, by lorde. it's perfect; her whole album is, actually.

**a/n: **i don't even know what this is  
i'm supersuper sorry this is so late; i feel horrible. also i've never written anything creepy like this, so bear with me :) i feel like it's a bit rushed, too. but if i keep saying the bad things about this, you won't give it a chance so i'll shut up.

**disclaimer: **unfortunately, i don't own clique, any companies/brands mentioned, or reva's prompts.

* * *

**skin and bones**

**.**

_"our lives will only ever always  
__continue to be a balancing act  
__that has less to do with pain  
__and more to do with beauty."_

_-Shane Koyzcan, 'To This Day'_

**.**

An american colonial house, built from splayed maroon wood and held together by imagination; the surrounding trees an obscure olive in color, and casting shadows onto the yard. It was Halloween in Westchester, late into the night, of course, but nevertheless every teenager in the city would surely be out. It was somewhat of a tradition to the high school—go scowering for candy until midnight, and then head to the nearest fellow student's house, preferably a popular one, and drink until dawn. Barely anyone ever returned to school the next day, not even the teachers, due to being hung over.

Dylan Marvil chattered her teeth and pulled her wool cardigan closer around her skin, glancing behind her. The nearly black street was completely abandoned, and having already walked two miles home from the nearest party, she longed to stop for a rest. Kemp Hurley, known by Dylan as the "sweet, devoted boyfriend" and as "the man-whore" to the rest of the school, had ditched her and left her with no ride.

_"I told you so, Dylan,__" _her mother would say to her when she gets home, _"You should have known better." _That was all she heard from her, lately, corrections on her own daughter's "stupid decisions". She took her mom's words with worship in the beginning, but after awhile the only thing that came out of the statement was lowered self-esteem.

Heaving a sigh, Dylan rounded the corner on what she expected to be a main street—but instead stared at a vast house, one falling apart.

At least four stories high, the building's size intimidated even Massie Block's house. Most of the windows were cracked, shards of glass even fallen onto the porch. The door had been completely ruined, pieces of it strayed around the house; which was surrounded by an immense forest. Everything about it screamed _badbadbad, _but Dylan stopped in her steps, fascinated.

She was puzzled—she could've sworn that the road she had been on was State, which directly connected only to her destination. Backing up a couple of steps, she glanced at the street sign, which indeed read the one she had been looking for.

The particularly odd thing about Dylan's life, lately, was that she couldn't remember bits and pieces of it. She would find herself in a completely different place after hours, when she recalled being somewhere else before.

To her, empty minds were the scariest thing.

**.**

She was particularly bitter and detached that day.

"Hello?" Dylan muttered, stepping over an out of place scrap, and landing with a creak onto the porch. The house was eerily silent—the entire woods was, really. There was something about it that, even though she knew wasn't smart, made her gain an obsessive need to go inside.

Her red, cashmere glove grazed the door hinge, and she peeked inside. It looked exactly as you would expect a ruined house to look. Lint cluttered in the corners, dust coated and pale furniture set variously around the room. Gradual classical music repeated from a record in the corner, and thin flames flickered in the fireplace in the corner, which illuminated the room to some extent. However, the one peculiar thing about it was a completely bare circle in the middle of the one-roomed first floor. Not just was it item-free, but it was cleaned to the point that the floor even shimmered.

And in the center sat a boy, facing the wall opposite her and legs folded.

Dylan's heart began to _thumpthump,_ being clearly audible to her. "Excuse me?" she murmured, taking a couple slow steps closer to get a better look at him. From behind, he looked about her age, with a strong body build and black hair, but the dying embers of the fire made it difficult to see.

She rounded the corner and her breath shallowed and her hands flew to her pale lips. Her heartbeat became even louder than the silence, yet part of her couldn't hear it.

Josh Hotz sat in the center of the room. This shouldn't have been a problem—except he been trapped in a fire and was pronounced dead almost two years ago.

His mocha eyes were empty; his expression and void of emotion. For a moment Dylan thought that he was still dead, merely sitting up, if it wasn't for an occasional blink and his fingertips, which tapped in a continuous pattern against the wooden floorboards. She stumbled back a step, chest heaving up and down. The room was still for a while, until Josh's lusterless face suddenly twisted into a slow, but insane grin, and his mouth creaked open and;

"Dylan."

Everything about the moment told her to _go_ _back, _particularly the fact that her dead former boyfriend was alive in front of her, but instead she strided forward towards him. To her, he looked broken underneath his mad smile and his wild eyes. She began to wonder why she wasn't as scared as she should've been; why she was fascinated. His grin triggered one in her, and she chuckled in wonder at him.

It was all shattered with a scream, then.

It was vague who's scream it actually was—Dylan's or Josh's—but it was completely ear-shattering. She soon recognized it as her own voice, while realizing that her mouth was open and throat sickly vibrating, but then she noticed the boy in front of her—with his mouth strained open and shrieking, as well. The two noises morphed into one, but Dylan had yet to distinguish that. The house began to sink horrifically, its crumbling walls finally falling into the floor and the ground raising and twisting. She squeezed her eyes shut to get away from the horror, but it was still there past her eyelids. It never actually went away, not even before she arrived at the house, which she now realized. The world was constantly intertwining itself with things that weren't meant to be joined, ending up with abhorrent overreactions. With a pang, it came to her that it was her fault, everything, and that countless tragedies that have happened were because of _her_ and she didn't know it and that everyone causes tragedies at one point in their life, it's just how things work and people refused to accept it, but instead blamed others because it made them feel better and —

**.**

— Dylan Marvil found herself standing in a graveyard.

Once again, her mind was void of any memories except for a party the night before, and she knew that something was forgotten, just not knowing what. In fact, she didn't even have a clue how she found herself in the cemetary, and even less the particular spot she was in; Josh Hotz's gravestone.

She snapped out of her trance and glanced curiously around her surroundings, specifically the immense forest and the street sign reading State. A spark of recognition passed through her, but she dismissed it as a light case of deja vu (from a dream, possibly), but it didn't cross her mind once that the supposed deja vu was connected to her mind losses.

Turning sharply, Dylan, dazed, began to walk away, her shadow disappearing and leaving the ghost of an abandoned house behind her—one of the famous Hotz family fire.

**.**

And after, her own faked smiles became the most feared.

* * *

so this was confusing and i was even confused a bit writing it. i realized this after writing it, and also that there's pretty much no romantic contact between the two—so sorry about that.

anyway, go check out the _o__ctavian country day rp forum_, it's third down on the clique forums :) i'll update lonely wonders soon, i swear.

**randomthing of the day: **for some reason the song miss jackson by panic! at the disco reminds me of the show teen wolf.

yoyoyoyoyoyoyoreviewyoyoyoyoyoyoyo

Lily


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